Coincidence? Taken literally, the idea that a building might sink a market seems nonsense. But giant structures, from the pyramids to the NASD's latest effort, clearly are linked to the fortunes of the organizations that envision them. The only uncertainty is how. Think of this mysterious relationship as the Xanadu Effect.

Xanadu, you may recall, was the palatial centerpiece of Orson Welles' Citizen Kane, the brilliantly unfair film biography of William Randolph Hearst. Welles borrowed the name (if not the caves of ice) from Coleridge and modeled the place after Hearst's own grand folly, La Cuesta Encantada, or "The Enchanted Hill," a neo-Hispanic latifundium overlooking San Simeon Bay in central California. It became famous as Hearst Castle. (Its owner preferred to call it a "ranch.") On its 24,000 acres were a 354,000-gallon swimming pool, a private zoo and four main buildings with a total of 165 rooms. Along with other such extravagances, the estate helped send Hearst into trusteeship late in life. The cavernous halls of Welles' gloomy cinematic Xanadu seemed to filmgoers - as the real, happier building must have appeared to many Hearst Corp. public investors - the very image of the pride that goes before a fall.

As markets crash and companies fold, it is tempting to attach the same significance to the Marketsite Tower. In a 1997 article in Scientific American, William Mitchell, dean of the the School of Architecture and Planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (dossier), suggested that big buildings had turned from cost-efficient machines to shareholder-paid CEO observatories.

High-technology companies, on the other hand, traded big architectural statements for virtual monuments on the Web. Yes, these surging corporations had poured billions into other forms of aggrandizement, from multipage newspaper ads to Super Bowl spots. But their headquarters had nearly always been horizontal complexes in the suburbs, not grand towers in established cities. Admirers saw this as a fitting discipline. The Marketsite Tower was a departure from structural reticence, perhaps even a tempting of fate.

Mitchell's essay evokes the fascination and unease that the gigantic engenders. Great buildings seem linked to the faltering fortunes of overweening egos, like Hearst's. They appear to accompany tyranny, too, most notoriously in Albert Speer's unfinished plans for a 180,000-seat Great Assembly Hall in Nazi-era Berlin, with a 1,000-foot-high dome said to be capable of producing its own rain clouds, the ultimate in Sturm und Drang. Its Red counterpart, largely completed, was Nicolae Ceaucescu's 2,000-room House of the People in Bucharest. Lined with Transylvanian marble, it reportedly consumed a fifth of Romania's gross national product. The realities of grandeur can be more bizarre than the delusions.

Critics like Mitchell are not necessarily against size or wealth; they do oppose flaunting it in three dimensions. They are the megalophobes. There is much to be said, however, for what one might call the macrophile point of view. Macrophiles do not necessarily endorse giant organizations. They do believe that Promethean projects are sometimes needed to light fires in the human mind.